Bella keeps busy.

She has no shortage of things to keep busy with. She's meeting "neutral" demon species - the non-neutral ones are more of a problem, but are also likely to be more delicate to handle. She's planning her own space-base; she might put it on Mercury so she's not copying anybody. She's talking through Jane with the rest of the peal about the upcoming trip to Pattern's Saturn (heh, that rhymes) to enchant it. Since Golden isn't going to be using Jokes as an enchantment channel, Juliet's going to borrow him, and Shell Bell's going to ask Ghosty, unless any of the relevant Jokers register an objection to this arrangement. They should be able to cover a large swath of the gas giant in a day or so and all come back with fantastic new auras. Rose only took as long as she did because she had to learn out of books as she went along and was not overambitious about her enchantments.

She's conservative with her coins. Bella can't quite get up the temerity to ask her Sherlock whether he and Tony have been getting up to anything minty. It's common knowledge that Sherlocks aren't quite as productive as Jokers are, boosted or not, so Juliet doesn't think Stella thinks much of it when asked for a few extras in the higher denominations. (Stella is the one with three mints. And an established empire that doesn't need a lot of startup-cost coin use.) Everyone knows Juliet has a Sherlock and not a Joker. Everyone knows Juliet has a trickier worldstate to start from than most Bells.

But she has no implicit explanation for running out of mere pentagons.

Someone would ask - someone would say "are things not back to normal between you and your Sherlock?" - and Juliet doesn't want to talk about it, not any more than she has to, doesn't even want to say she doesn't want to talk about it.

She thinks she's doing a good job of acting normally around him. Occasionally something will trigger her into a rash of distressed solicitousness, but mostly, she's behaving like everything is fine, everything is normal. Except that she's leaving the ball completely in his court in terms of scheduling the resumption of physical relationship components. Snuggling and kissing are firmly back on the menu, and she helps herself. He's bitten her once, since, and she's glad it was one of the lucky bites (regeneration helps, he can go on without worrying about her health). Because she can just imagine awkwardly squirming and making excuses and teleporting to her bedroom rather than risk wheedling him when he's some unknown amount of fragile and has some unknown constellation of needs that he can't tell her but definitely don't include being pushed about anything labeled "sex".

And she has no implicit explanation for running out of pentagons.

But she does still have her Slayer leftovers.

Pain tolerance.

What was it Shell Bell would have done for her, months ago, if she could've stood to do it? Broken her arm?

Bella can't think of a great way to break her actual arm - well, she could just wish it broken, but the no-bootstrapping constraint on minting might make that pointless.

She can break her wrist, though.

She sits on the edge of her bed and she clasps her hands together and pretends one of them belongs to somebody else and that it needs to break. She feeds her autopilot. She twists. It hurts. She holds it in place just enough that if she lets up at all she gets squares instead of pentagons. She mints.